This jazz standard was written by Robert Wright and George Forrest for the 1953 musical, Kismet. It was originally written in 3/4 time but is usually interpreted by pop and jazz players in 4/4 time. Ted’s arrangement indicates to play it in 4/4 time. Check out YouTube for the 1958 version by the Kirby Stone Four – it was a top hit at that time.

This early arrangement by Ted was written in 1977 and designed for “Chord Melody Style, Level 1.” At that time Ted was using a stamper with red ink to create his chord grid boxes. Instead of a using a simple lead sheet I wrote out the full chord-melody notation. However, this should be used primarily as a guide—you’ll want to be freer in your melodic and rhythmic interpretation in order to bring some personality and life to it. Add a lot of arpeggios, “delays” and perhaps a few moving bass lines to fill up the measures. The chords in parentheses are Ted’s “fill” chords. If you want to play the piece a second time, you might like to add some kind of turnaround in the last measure (try Am11 – D7 altered).

At the bottom of Ted’s original page he wrote: “Try to understand the reasons for all the above chords. If stumped, please ask questions.”

Some Comments: (the measure numbers refer to the compilation pages)

Measure 4: Ted has a variation on the melody of the last note of this measure. His Fdim/maj7 chord has a D note (indicated by the triangle), whereas the composition calls for an Eb here. I’ve left the notation with the correct Eb. You may wish to play Ted D note instead.

Measure 7: For the Fmaj7 chord, you might want to play the soprano E note with the open first string. On the Gm9 diagram I’ve added an X in green to indicate a melody note that was omitted by Ted. In many of his very early arrangements he would leave out some of the moving lines and then indicate that the arrangement was an “outline format”—the student was expected to add any missing melody notes. As Ted developed his diagram notation more fully he tended to included all the melody notes, moving lines, and sustained notes in his grid diagrams.

Measure 8: The Bbmaj7 is a fill chord. I chose to write it out as an arpeggio with the top A note sustained for the entire measure, using a first-finger barre, carried over from the previous Am7 chord.

Measure 11: For the E melody note on the last beat of this measure, play it with the open first string. This is another melody note Ted left off his diagram.

Measure 12: Just like in measure 4, Ted wrote a melodic variation on the Adim/maj7 chord. The correct note is a G-natural for the last note of the measure. Play Ted’s Gb if you wish.

Measure 19: I prefer to play the Dbmaj9 chord on the top 4 strings—same notes, just a different part of the neck. It seems easier to finger for me, plus it transitions nicely into the next chord (Dm7).

Measure 24: This is a very small thing, but you may find the transition of the F to Db7 smoother if you finger it as: 3,2,4 to 3,2,4,1.

Measure 28: Try this fingering: For the Am7(b5): 1,3,1,2 then lift finger 3 off to get the inner moving line. Now for the A13(b9): 1,2,2,2 then add finger 4 for the X note. For the D7(#9#5): 1,2,2,3 or 1,2,2,4 then lift the finger off the second string for the A note.

Measure 30: In order to get the A note to sustain between the Gm9 and the C13 chords, finger it as: 2,3,3,3,4 to 2,1,3,3,3,4.

The rest is rather self-explanatory and you shouldn’t have any difficulties working out fingerings. Try adding a slight slide up to the X melody note on the D7(b9#5) chord in measure 32, and for the X melody note on the C9 chord in measure 33. It seems to add a nice touch to the piece.

Hope you enjoy playing this arrangement.
--Paul

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